Winston Churchill

Born 30 November 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxford shire. Attended Harrow and Sandhurst before embarking on an army career, seeing action in India, and Sudan. Became Conservative MP in 1900, but in 1904 joined the Liberal Party. Cabinet member from 1908, he was First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 until the disastrous Dardanelles expedition in the early part of WW1. Served on the Western Front for a time, before rejoining government from 1917-1929. Opposition to Indian self-rule, warnings about the rise of the Nazis, and support for Edward VIII left Churchill politically isolated during the 1930s. After WW2 broke out, he replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, where his reputation as an inspirational wartime leader was cemented. They lost power in the 1945 election but were returned to power in 1951, and continued as prime ministers until 1955. Died on 24 January 1965 and was given a state funeral.

Winston Churchill, in full Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, January 24, 1965, London), British statesman, orator, and author who as PM (1940–45, 1951–55) rallied the British people during World War II and led his country from the brink of defeat to victory. After a sensational rise to prominence in national politics before World I, Churchill became notorious for making an erratic judgment in the war itself and in the decade that followed. Politically suspect in consequence, he was an alone figure until his response to Adolf Hitler's challenge regained lost glory and allowed him to the leadership of a national coalition in 1940. Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin fostered Allied strategy in World War II, and after the breakdown of the alliance, he alerted the West to the expansionist threat of the Soviet Union. He led the Conservative Party back to the office in 1951 and remained prime minister until 1955, compelled to resign due to illness.

Churchill was sufficiently fascinated with Islam for his family to be concerned at one point that he might convert. And in 1940, his cabinet set aside £100,000 for the construction of a mosque in London in recognition of the Indian Muslims who fought for the British Empire. He later told the House of Commons: "Many of our friends in Muslim countries all over the East have already expressed great appreciation of this gift." "His relationship with Islam is far more complex than most people realize," Dockter suggests, noting that Churchill went on holiday to Istanbul and played polo in India with Muslims.

Dr. Sashi Tharoor writing a famous book “Inglorious Empire chronicles” the atrocities of the British Empire, said the former British PM should be remembered alongside the most prominent dictators of the twentieth century. He wrote the blame for the Bengal Famine rested with Churchill. In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal. This is the man whom the British insist on hailing as some apostle of freedom and democracy. In his view, he wrote that Churchill is really one of the rulers of the 20th century only fit to stand in the company of the likes of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin. Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does. Particularly the decisions that he personally signed off during the Bengal Famine when 4.3 million people died because of the decisions he took or endorsed. Not only did the British pursue their own policy of not helping the victims of this famine which was created by their policies. Churchill persisted in exporting grain to Europe, not to feed actual to use his phrase, but to add to the buffer stocks that were being piled up in the event of a future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. Ships laden with wheat were coming in from Australia docking in Calcutta and were instructed by Churchill not to disembark their cargo but sail on to Europe. And when conscience-stricken British officials wrote to the Prime Minister in London pointing out that his policies were causing needless loss of life all he could do was write peevishly in the margin of the report, ‘Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?'"During British rule many dark chapters of our colonial history, like the Bengal famine of 1943. At least three million people died of hunger. That's more than six times the British Empire's casualties in World War Two. Churchill's government turned down urgent pleas for food. 

Churchill had some sympathy for the Jewish Bolshevism " conspiracy theory and stated in his 1920 article "Zionism versus Bolshevism" that communism, which he considered a "worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality”, had been established in Russia by Jews: There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistically Jews; it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power come from the Jewish leaders. Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill's official biographer, countered that "he was familiar with the Zionist ideal and supported the idea of a Jewish state". But being anti-Semitic and a Zionist are not incompatible, says Charmley. "Churchill with no doubt at all was a fervent Zionist," he says, "a fervent believer in the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own, and that state should be in what we then called Palestine." But he also "shared the low-level casual anti-Semitism of his class and kind", he says. If we judged every one of that era by the standards of 21st Century political correctness, they'd all be guilty, he notes. "It shouldn't blind us to the bigger picture."

 A 1937 unpublished article - supposedly by Churchill - entitled "How the Jews Can Combat Persecution" was discovered in 2007. "It may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution - that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer," it said. "There is the feeling that the Jew is an incorrigible alien, that his first loyalty will always be towards his own race." But there was immediately a row over the article, with Churchill historians pointing out it was written by journalist Adam Marshall Diston

"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace," Churchill said of his anti-colonialist adversary in 1931. "Gandhi should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting," Churchill told the cabinet on another occasion. "We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died." It's unfashionable today to question Gandhi's non-violent political tactics. He is venerated in much the same way as Churchill is in the UK. But for years he was a threat to Churchill's vision for the British Empire. 

Dr. Tharoor, a former Indian government minister, delivered an emphatic speech filled with passion at the Oxford Union in July of 2015 which went viral. He wrote about the economic toll British rule took on India citing the reason "India's share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23 percent. By the time the British left, it was down to below four percent. Why? Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India."